DocWatts

Interesting how residents expecting Utilities that they've paid for to be functional is somehow twisted into asking for a Handout. The amount of Mental Gymnastics to get to that one is beyond my comprehension. Amazing how this guy wasn't even putting up a pretense of at least pretending to care that the people who put him into Office are freezing in thier Homes. Vote for Stupid Politicians, win Stupid Prizes.

This is a public post from the Mayor of Colorado City, Texas, in response to residents of his town being without electricity and water after a Winter Storm that shut down parts of the state. (The Mayor resigned a short time after posting this).

Plenty of contemporary Moral Philosophers who take a more Relativist view of ethics, you just won't find many of them before the emergence of the postmodern Value Meme and the advent of Social Construct Theory and Deconstructionism.

I've been transitioning to a plant based diet over the course of the past few years for ethical reasons, but I also get the sense that is a structural issue endemic to Industrial Societies, and something that won't be solved until several generations pass and countries like the US are roughly at SD-Stage Green. Either that or because Climate Change literally forces our hand, with how unsustainable meat heavy diets are. Of course there's a possibility that synthetic lab grown meat could perhaps be part of a move away from factory farming, but it's not something I'm holding my breath about. My intuitive sense is that as long as large portions of society are having trouble meeting their basic needs, worrying about animal suffering is sadly going to be something of a luxury for privileged people to worry about. Hell, in the US we haven't even fully transitioned away from what can arguably be considered Human Slave Labor, when you consider the state of the US Prison system and how inmates are paid pennies for manual labor.

Kind of a moot point since they fought a war to protect the interests of Slave Owners.

All very good points. I think some of difficulty also comes from the fact that it can be difficult to separate Good Faith discussions on difficult issues like racism from Bad Faith Actors willing to use such discussions to legitimize their own internalized implicit racism. Ben Shapiro and Ken Wilber might both discuss some of the excesses that you mention, but one is doing it legitimize racist attitudes, and the other is doing it to help people ascend developmentally in order to transcend racism. This is an exaggerated and obvious comparison to demonstrate the point (at least to those who are literate in basic developmental psychology), but in most cases most of the time that distinction won't always be so easy to draw. I read an interesting book recently which goes in to detail about how culture at different levels of development use different emotional regimes to enforce norms and behaviors. Whereas roughly SD-Stage Red societies primarily use the emotional regime of Fear to motivate behavior, as you move up the spiral that eventually changes to Guilt (SD-Stage Blue), Shame (SD-Stage Orange). Once you reach roughly SD-Stage Green, there's not really a great English word for it, but the emotional regime is that of trying to avoid provoking the envy of others (such as avoiding ostentatious displays of wealth, and so on).

In today's world racism is more often than not Implicit, rather than Explicit. An example of explicit racism would consist of shouting racial slurs of someone on a bus. Someone who's Implicitly Racist would be far more likely to eagerly look for reasons as to why a black teenager shot and killed by the police deserved to die. If you confronted this person, they would deny that this behavior is racist; and this is because they are simply unaware (or in denial) of how things like Implicit Bias operate. The reason for this shift from Explicit to Implicit is because cultural norms have gradually shifted so that expressing openly racist attitudes is no longer tolerated by most of society. That doesn't mean racism has gone away though, it just means that the racism exists today is more subtle than racism of the past. And even people with quite Explicitly Racist worldviews, such as Richard Spencer, have gone out of their way to rebrand themselves as 'race realists' in an attempt to make racist rhetoric more palatable for mainstream acceptance.

That's the great counter-factual that we can't really be sure of. I guess I would counter that Trump's acquittal and its corresponding weakening of the Rule of Law outweighs the potential negative effects of further antagonizing Trump's Cult-like followers. But of course it's difficult to back up such a claim, as quantifying how much Harm each would be likely to cause is a seemingly impossible task.

The problem isn't that he'll win, the problem is that he'll continue to occupy the public spotlight to spread misinformation, and that when he loses we'll see more outbursts of violence from his Cult like followers. Let's hope that his ban from Social Media sticks...

It's a little bit more complicated than that. Impeachment is something that was designed specifically for elected public officials, but most of the time when people in the US refer to Impeachment, they're usually specifically referring to Presidential Impeachment. So how it works is that 67 Senators (two thirds majority) would have to vote to convict. But then after that it's another simple majority Vote (51 Senators) to strip the Impeached President of his ability to run for office again, strip him of his pension, etc (something that would almost certainly happen if he were to be impeached, the additional Vote being more of a formality). In theory any US Citizen could be put on Criminal Trial for Treason, but Impeachment is just for elected officials. We have a weird patchwork of laws here, but in most States convicted felons lose thier Right to Vote and lose thier Right to hold Public Office. One other point about Impeachment is that counter intuitively Impeachment doesn't carry with it Criminal Charges, so my initial point was that in addition to being Impeached, Trump should also be held criminally liable for citing a violent insurrection.

I agree that if our system was working as intended, he would be on trial in criminal court on charges of Treason for inciting an Insurrection that lead to deaths, and put the lives of many more in danger. Impeachment specifically has some additional penalties which are extremely important, and justified under the circumstances: (1) Most importantly, he would be ineligible to run for President again in the future, and he would be barred from holding any other Public Office. (2) He would lose his Presidential Pension as well as Secret Service Protection. In addition, his would no longer have his travel expenses reimbursed with public funds. (3) Another important aspect of an Impeachment Trial is to expose Trump's crimes in an open and public forum for the nation to see. It also attempts to set a precedent of Accountability for public servants who commit crimes while in Office.

Not sure if this is exactly what you were looking for, but developmental imbalances seem like a big one. Someone can operate at a high degree of cognitive complexity while being less developed in other areas, such as the breadth and depth of thier emotional and moral development, with all of the associated pathologies which that entails. Think of any of the numerous examples of Highly Intelligent people whose Shadow manifests as sociopathic personality traits. Or conversely, someone can possess a great deal of depth that outstrips thier own cognitive complexity, with Magical Thinking and some of the unhealthy aspects of the New Age Community being good examples of this. Another developmental imbalance that can happen is when people's Effective Value Meme (ie SD-Stage) is wildly out of sync with that individual's psychological development. The reason that this is a problem is that if the SD stage you've been imprinted with outstrips your own psychological development, you'll likely be operating with a flattened and dysfunctional version of that Value Meme. Hell, anyone who uses developmental models like Spiral Dynamics to judge and shame other people is a great example of this. Or twenty year old kids who get imprinted with a flattened version of SD Green while still emotionally immature, and then become toxic caricatures of that Value Meme.

For anyone interested, Dannielle Daniele Bolelli did an excellent podcast about this very topic some time back https://luminarypodcasts.com/listen/daniele-bolelli/history-on-fire/10c7f0c4-18a7-44e8-ab47-0ba1a54a4c09?_branch_match_id=764612009058455000&country=US

No one was really expecting Biden to be a saint of Green environmentalism, I'm happy enough to have someone reasonably responsible and sane when it comes to ecological policy. Rejoining the Paris Climate Accords and ending the Keystone XL Pipeline pretty much immediately on taking office are encouraging signs. We can and should push Biden to do more of course, but let's not apply Purity Politics to environmental issues, as it's incredibly counter productive.

Kernel of truth here. But that's also overlooking two plus decades of Right Wing propaganda and disinformation that radicalized segments of the population to the point of being detached from reality, becoming prime candidates for being suckered into an Authoritarian Cult of Personality. Add to that a declining standard of living and the decimation of the American middle class due to decades of destructive neoliberal/neoconservative economic policy, and you have the perfect conditions for the re-emergence of fascist right wing populism.

@Leo Gura Shaming others for not having the patience or ability to wade through hundreds of pages of dense, poorly written prose (when there are others ways of getting that information) is counter productive. Hell the fact that you try to present your videos using understandable language and conversational tone along with decent production values (ie not using a $40 Camera that has trouble picking up audio) is proof that the way information is presented matters. Nothing wrong with a work being difficult, but at the very least it should also be engaging.

That is cool! Certainly a breath of fresh air to see optimistic sci-fi from settings other than Star Trek. I do think that some of the reasons why we don't see as many optimistic looks at the future (aside from the obvious one; that cynicism and cautionary tales are more aligned with the current zietgiest) is that from a storytelling perspective it's generally more difficult to create dramatic tension in an optimistic setting. Star Trek struggled with this as well, with the best storytelling in that setting dealing with how a relative Utopia (compared to today) still has challenges and difficulties. Not the least of which are how it interacts with other Cultures and Societies that don't share its ideals.

Without an actual policy platform they can sell people on or even a coherent vision for the country, no surprise that Republicans are grasping for straws in a really pathetic and obvious way. If and when Biden does fuck up in a real way, Republican criticism will be drowned out by the Left Wing of Biden's own Party. So far though all due credit to the Democratic Party for the unity that's been on display so far between Centrists and Progressives. And all it took for that to happen was a global pandemic followed by a fascist coup attempt.

And also Corporations are not democracies, the vast majority of them are run as top-down Autocracies. Now this is 'fine' as long as these mini Autocracies are regulated and controlled by more powerful democratic institutions, but take those restraints away and you're in for a horror show. Look to sweatshops and factory farms to see just how devoid of morality Corporations will sink to when not reigned in by an outside power.

Autocratic power structures have proved stable in China, the largest country in the world, for more than half a century. I certainly wouldn't want to live under one, but claiming that they're inherently unstable reeks of Western chauvinism.

Don't underestimate the power of Willful Ignorance and Motivated Reasoning. If large swathes of people were capable of using empirical evidence to modify thier worldview, we wouldn't have 70 million people voting against thier self interest when they cast a ballot to give Trump a second term.

*shakes head* Did no one read any cyberpunk literature (or even watch movies like Robocop or Alien), and get it through their thick skulls that allowing Corporations to form their own governments is objectively a terrible idea? Let's just go back to the days where workers get paid in company scrip while we're at it...

If anyone here actually works within (or is broadly knowledgeable about) one of the Social Sciences, I'd be highly interested in hearing your insights on the matter. I'll often see critiques on works meant for the Public (ie non specialists in that academic field) refuted not by a broad refutation of the work's overall argument, but death by a thousand cuts style critiques which cite methodological problems within the research used to back up arguments in the work. Steven Pinker's work comes to mind for a good example of this, in regards to Better Angles of Our Nature. But I've also seen this applied to a lesser extend for some of Jared Diamond's work as well. I could also list the numerous examples from within the field of psychology, with the replicability problem that's plagued the field and has supposedly discredited a number of high profile studies. As to contextualizing these types of critiques, do methodological problems on their own present a good case for questioning someone's entire argument, or should these also be backed up my other forms of critique, such as argumentation? Obviously this will vary on a case by case basis to some degree, and will also depend on how heavily the author's argument depends on empirical research, but in general how much weight should be afforded to these types of arguments? Or are they more often Red Herrings if not backed up by other forms of critique? Not a Social Scientist or Researcher myself, so it would be interested to hear some other thoughts on this issue.

@Carl-Richard That's interesting, the Construct Validity framework that you bring up seems to make a lot of sense for some of the critiques I see of pop-psychology models (such as Myers-Briggs). Sometimes it can be hard to parse out well grounded criticism pointing out the flaws of particular model from Snobbery on the part of Academics, as any model presented to non specialists (ie the Public) is going to have to be 'flattened' to some degree, losing some of its nuance in the process. I'm also of the Utilitarian mindset when it comes to Science, while at the same time I also see that ideas can be over-simplified to the point of becoming misleading, thus creating a potential to cause harm by propagating misinformation.